Is Anime Woke?

Before we answer the question above, let's define what is 'woke' first. Woke has become a buzzword throughout US media. People use the word to label all sorts of people and ideas: woke companies, woke video games, woke chicken nuggets.

Beyond being bad English grammar, "I am woke" (grammatically it should be "woke up" or "I have awakened" or even "I’m awake." Woke is the past tense form of wake. ) carries the weight of identity for many people. The term also works as as slur. So, before we can answer the question "Is anime woke?" we will first attempt to define what woke means as a slang term.

Woke is a slang term that points toward awakening to social injustice. This use of the word goes back to the 1950s and 1960s within the American Black community where the term used to "figuratively refer to being 'aware' or 'well informed' in a political or culture sense" (Saad, 2023).

William Melvin Kelley, in his 1962 New York Times article, links the term woke with the slang term dig, which was used to mean "to understand." Woke associated with people that were cool, hip, smart, and worthy of being a role model during the 1950s-1960s (Simama, 2023).

The term reappeared during after several police-related incidents against the Black community around 2015. While these incidents were not, sadly, anything new, widespread media and Internet coverage brought these incidents to people’s attention. Woke became a badge of honor among Democrats and became a term encompassing what needed to be stopped from the Republican perspective (Jacques, 2023).

So is Anime woke? Let us use the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster first definition of woke because it aligns with the historical use of the term. Wokeness extends to general awareness of facts and problems a society faces. Each society and social group will have its own definition of wokeness. Republicans, for example, are woke about the problems wokeness can pose when it becomes militant.

They are woke about the decline of organized religion and of community. Democrats are woke about climate change and continuing race issues. Neither party is woke about the plight of Native Americans. By the way, I am "woke" to the painful grammar of these sentences! But then, slang usually has painful grammar. I find "to rizz up" equally painful because it means "to charisma up" someone. Again, nothing new.

So, using this definition of woke and this caveat about anime, anime is indeed woke about many problems Japanese society faces. Some stories are woke to the problems developed societies at large face, such as the mental health problems men face and the misogyny women continue to face.

Anime is woke about the challenges different-sexed people face: usually illustrating this with demons, animal people, or half-breeds like half-elves.

Anime is not woke about American issues because anime addresses problems within Japanese society, many narratives can appear as quite conservative to Americans, such as stories about men trying to protect women or climb to the top of their sport. Japan is socially different from the United States. Japan faces entirely different problems which makes stories which address those problems simultaneously woke for Japan and not woke for the United States.

Is anime woke? is the wrong question to ask because the answer is both yes and no.

Anime points out problems in Japanese society and the larger human condition. All good stories point to problems within their home societies and the human condition.

It’s not appropriate to apply a politicized American term to another culture’s narratives. The label doesn’t fit anime because it has a different context and history. Applying such a label shows you aren’t woke! You are misappropriating an already misappropriated term to a different cultural output. Ironic isn’t it? And that shows just how problematic the tossing around of the term can be. A better question is to ask "how well does anime explore the human condition?" And the answer to that question too depends.